Birthdays, Utensils

4 January 2013

Birthdays and How to Eat

            Another birthday story: A few weeks ago, our Irish neighbor invited us to join her for a birthday buffet in near-by SM Marikina mall. This is just a 20-minute walk away. It turns out that Vikings, the amazing buffet that we went to several months ago down near Manila Bay, had opened up a restaurant in our neighborhood mall and, if you brought several official documents of proof, you could eat for free on your birthday.

            We took the day off from work and I got in line at 10:00am to reserve us a table when the restaurant opened at 11:00am. We ended up feasting on delicious food. I had been craving simple pizza with vegetables and they had an oven there where I could custom-order one to my liking.

            The fun and new thing, though, was the birthday craziness. Turns out at least a dozen other people with the same birthday came to eat for free. Around 12:30, a team of Vikings staff started going around the room with maracas, tambourines, a Viking hat, and a HUGE birthday sign (so big that it had three big metal braces on the back to support it). Over the next hour, they stopped at each birthday table and sang a three-minute medley of birthday songs. Our friend’s fiancée captured about half of the singing on his camera before he ran out of space or batteries. 

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Eating in the Philippines

            One of the cultural differences we’ve noticed is in the utensils people use to eat. In the Philippines (and apparently much of southeast Asia), people don’t use knives. Instead, they only set the table with fork and spoon. We stumbled through using these tools (cutting with a spoon can be tricky if you aren’t used to it) before finally asking one of our Filipino friends the trick to using them. Here’s a brief video explaining some of the technique. Part of the reason for this particular combination, we think, is that every meal has a side of rice with an ulam, or main course. So scooping with a spoon is much more important and efficient than stabbing with a fork. And I guess people just learn to cut with spoons.

            During our week in Hong Kong our chopstick technique improved by leaps and bounds, something we practiced more in Singapore. In Singapore, the mix of Malay, Chinese, and Indian cultures means that there’s no real set way to eat anything. People use chopsticks, spoons, forks, knives, in whatever way they want. We’re curious to see what we’ll see in Indonesia when we leave next week.